DayZ

Hello survivors! Where the last couple of Status Reports felt a bit dry and lacking on exciting content, we're doing our best to improve our track record this week! Starting off with Brian, and his excitement which clearly shows that we've had a good couple of rough, but good weeks, through Eugen, who's offering a closer look at the contents of the upcoming Gamescom DEMO, and then over to Peter, who details the changes made to melee and firearms behaviour in 0.63, it's a joyride of teasing new and exciting content. Adam continues by sharing his bits on new decals updates, our Brand Manager Martin assures everyone that the Gamescom news will make its way to everybody, and Baty invites you to Gamescom AND to our upcoming community event next week that goes together with a pre-gamescom developer live stream.

Oh hey, and there's also GIFs showing some new stuff (because yes - it is a long read again). Ready? Go!

Contents This Week

Dev Update/Brian

Dev Update/Eugen

Dev Update/Peter

Dev Update/Adam

Dev Update/Martin

Community Spotlight

Dev Update/Brian

Greetings Survivors,

As we approach Gamescom I can't help but reflect back on all the work, stress, and dedication that has preceded where we are now. Back in the end of 2013 when we were trying to prepare a build for Steam, we couldn't have imagined the opportunities all the time that has been spent on technology, and the foundation of the project would afford us. Looking at the Early Access release of one of my personal favourite pure survival titles, The Long Dark I can't help but remember what that experience was like when it first hit Steam, compared to how amazing it is now.

The team has been working tirelessly for quite some time, and the focus over the last month or so on preparing a functional vertical slice build for Gamescom, which should raise spirits a great deal internally. One of the most frustrating professional experiences for me has been working on adapting the design and experience of DayZ over the years, but knowing that you the consumers couldn't see these changes and get hands on with them until the underlying tech was ready to support it. Gamescom is just over the horizon, and I know everyone here on the team is really focused on trying to get an outstanding snapshot of the new DayZ experience for you all.

Not losing focus on the fact that the development teams'; core goals have been aimed specifically at setting the foundation of DayZ for the years to come is a difficult order. The technology that we hit Steam with fundamentally just can't do justice to the experience we want to bring, and fortunately leadership inside the company has understood that and supported our drive forward. BETA by no means is the end all be all milestone for DayZ - we have plenty of amazing things beyond it and before leaving Early Access - but this is fundamentally the biggest impact on how you the users interact with the world, and establishes the technology baseline that enables us to do all the things we've talked with you about over the years.

It's been a hell of a journey, but I wouldn't trade it for anything in the world.

- Brian Hicks / Creative Director

Dev Update/Eugen

Hey guys! I'm going to get into detail in regards to what the Gamescom DEMO is and what is the plan going forward with it. As the Gamescom is getting closer, things are being set in stone.

When we decided to go forward with the idea (which was about three months ago), we were nowhere near the expected result. However, deadlines and these goals make sure you are able to focus on what is actually important and as such help you eliminate the noise that gets in the way of development. Sometimes it's feature creep, other times you just follow an overly complicated solution to a problem that’s much simpler to solve. The renewed target helped us follow through.

Everything starts with how you control a game, it needs to feel just right. When the game is making it hard to do what you actually want to accomplish through arbitrary complexity or inconsistency, it quickly becomes tedious. As this DEMO features the new player controller, animation system, physics and much more, it will feel different at first glance. Interacting with players, AI or environment should feel much smoother. We will have the new controls printed out for players coming in for an easy reference point.

As this is quite a complex rework of the game, and we want people to test specific things, it will have its own "map" built around Staroye. The map includes new roads, rocks, and more reworked old assets as we are gradually improving visual fidelity, and leaving the old stuff behind. Only subset of player usable items will be spawning for the purpose of quick access, as we expect the turnover to be quite large. The density is also much higher to make sure you can try more things in a short span of time. Besides the map, you can also expect new particle effects implemented with Enfusion technology, new character faces and much more.

It will feature the new inventory implementation, which again should feel much smoother and faster as we have invested quite a lot of time to do this properly. And one large change that we expect to have significant impact on how people play: you won't be able to move with inventory open. A lot of the things that people have used inventory to solve, like finding small items or interacting with their weapon to avoid delayed quick bar, will be long gone. Items will show their icons in the world, as well as all action being moved to contextual methods. And quick bar will become a core part of your setup as you explore the world of DayZ. You will get more slots as you get higher tier items, which in translation will increase the amount of stuff you can get done quickly in the world.

There are tons of new animations coming in to show different states of character, exhaustion for example. And many detailed systems trying to avoid using text and use of heavy UI, so that living your life in Chernarus is all about your character. New gestures that will spice up the interaction between player, hopefully causing a laugh or two. Or making sure you can understand each other over a long distance.

Lot of new UI changes that will focus on giving you enough detail if you want, or just immerse into the character in front of you. Tons of new sounds both ambient, character or weapon related.

There is new synchronisation model that is quite different from what we had before, hoping to support the full scale of 100 players and tons of AI. All these things will be stress tested heavily to make sure there are no issues when we go live. Lot of the things are however heavily work in progress, but also for the first time, all of the new tech is in and working with new data. It's exciting as hell.

And last but not least, new melee combat and ranged combat. But I'll let Peter talk about those

There will be issues I'm sure, as something always slips past, or gets broken in the last second. This is a complex game in making, and we can't wait to share our progress with you. We are discussing the possibility of making the DEMO available for a limited time on a separate Steam branch, but we'll yet have to see about that.

As you may know from previous Status Reports, we scratched old firearms and melee implementations and started from the ground up to allow us fulfil our vision of having more control over firearms and melee fights, resulting in much better, authentic user experience. Both ranged and close combat have crucial role in DayZ, may it be in PvE or PvP encounters. Over the last few weeks, there was quite a lot of progress made in both combats, and now as things starts to look well enough, it's a good time to talk about them and showcase them.

Ranged combat with firearms is defined by their handling and aiming models. So far on handling side, we have loading of firearms with either magazine or chambering directly with ammo from inventory, quick slots and even from the ground. Next is the mechanism manipulation itself, were you can feed ammo from a magazine to chamber in case of manual firearms, or eject ammo in automatic ones. It's also used to un-jam the mechanism once it gets jammed by a casing not being ejected properly. We reintroduced zeroing and fire modes, as well as iron sights, though optics are not working now due to some issues we're battling down the line (specifically switching to camera point on optic attachment, to be honest we have ran into some problems with attachments in general lately, as they are not in hierarchical order, so it will require some rewrite).

Aiming model of firearms is where the real fun begins. Currently, we have a new sway mechanic (yay, finally!) - it mimics breathing with constant vertical movement as well as corrections of hands direction with subtle random horizontal movement. It's very effective and robust design solution which allows us to modify output by plenty of factors, like firearm attachments configuration, especially hand-guard and butt-stock, and its weight, character stance and movement, amount of stamina, overall character state with all that unpleasant things like low body temperature or diseases, and of course also the hold breath feature (yes, I'm not kidding).

Recoil is another functional part of the aiming model now. While projectile is fired, we've introduced movement to firearms in all three dimensions. We are experimenting with pre-animated recoils, which are procedurally modified to produce nice looking visuals with ability to differentiate between firearms. Similarly to sway, it can be modified, this time it could depend on calibre, barrel length, overall firearm weight and its attachments, especially muzzle devices like brakes or compensators, and we are also considering impact from stamina. What's still missing is some sights misalignment in the aiming model, same goes to lifting firearms next to obstacles, however we will get there as both are a must have for proper aiming model.

Quick update regarding new melee combat - in current state, it's already way ahead when compared to the old system. Apart from full body attack animations, which can now be chained into combos and opponents reacts to hits with proper strength and directions of impacts, there is also a dashed attack from sprint implemented now. I would like to highlight the current melee targeting implementation which is taking length of a melee weapon into account, as well as distance direction and vertical angle to opponent.

Combined with rotating and dragging character towards selected targets during attack animations, it produces great looking, fluid and addictive melee combat. It's quite hard to miss your opponent now, gone are the days of grotesque melee fights where everybody ran in circles trying to play game of chance to deal some hit.

[media.giphy.com]

Last but not least, we also introduced some changes to controls of the new character. What really stands out is changing of stances which is using one key now instead of three previously. With programmers and animators, we are discussing missing moves of new character, like leaning, jumping or climbing, as we would like to push on these and make them more interesting for gameplay.

Apart from Gamescom 2017... see you in Chernarus folks!

- Peter Nespesny / Lead Designer

Dev Update/Adam

Much like in the last Status Report, let's begin with a showcase of some additional improvements to the visual fidelity of Chernarus. This time, let's talk about decals.

On Chernarus, decals are primarily used to make specific areas (such as concrete surfaces and roads) look more damaged / abandoned. We cant simply add local damage to the concrete / roads texture itself as it would look too repetitive in the end. And so these decals are a great way to add a local damage exactly where we want.

While decal textures were trying really hard to show that there are holes in the road, they ultimately failed alone because they were missing visual depth in-game. Luckily, this was changed with the recent implementation of parallax mapping for decals. And since we have got new textures for roads for quite some time, we have also decided to re-do textures for all road damage decals so the visuals of decals match together with the new road textures (visual inconsistency between old decals and new roads is one of the reasons we decided to postpone the release of new road textures, originally planned for update 0.62). Here are some examples of how medium and small-sized decals look after these changes:

These changes (along with the new road textures that you can also notice on pictures) will be available with the update 0.63.

And as usual - a short report on what has happened on western border of Chernarus since the last Status Report. Details were added around the Myshkino dam (including the HV power-line connection to Zelenogorsk), new recreational facility of TES company near the shore of Myshkino dam and probably the biggest lumber mill we currently have on Chernarus has been added north of Myshkino military site. These locations will hopefully make encounters in the Myshkino tents valley a bit more interesting and offer additional looting options for the players who prefer to roam the western region of Chernarus.

As always, please remember that all pictures show work-in-progress content.

- Adam Franců / Senior Map Designer

Dev Update/Martin

As we started outlining our Gamescom DEMO over the last two Status Reports, I've noticed a raising concern in the community about us presenting a build of the game on a gaming convention rather than delivering it directly to the core players on our Experimental and Stable Steam branches. As our community of existing players is what we truly care about the most, I'd like to address these concerns and add further context to Eugen's text above.

First of all, thanks to Brian and his great relationships with guys over at Astro Gaming or Twitch, DayZ's been present at many public events in the past, and I'm sure it's always been fun for everyone to meet and greet while occasionally streaming or presenting some of the upcoming features. Usually, most of the news from these events also made it out to the general public - either by being directly shared by the DayZ team over social media, or organically by someone from the community posting on the forums or Reddit.

This worked quite well, and considering that those activities were not a part of any sophisticated marketing/promotional plan (there hasn't been anything like that for DayZ, and this won't change until BETA drops on Stable), it's also been quite effective.

Gamescom is a little bit of a step up from these events, as we'll be part of a bigger Bohemia Interactive booth. That means that our presence needs to be a bit more official, that we need to present something meaningful, and ideally also playable. That's where the Gamescom DEMO comes in - as a publicly playable content, it also conveniently solves three problems for us:

a) it helps the development team to deliver a package even before the first BETA build is done internally, or ready for public branches - hopefully helping everybody have a feeling of accomplishment (which Brian nicely described in his part)

b) it allows us to do very early focus tests in a controlled environment where we're standing right next to the person playing

c) it helps us make a point to the general public that we are being serious about our intentions to bring DayZ to a stable 1.0 release, and support it for years to come (which some people still refuse to believe in)

As Eugen already pointed out, we may (or may not), at some point, and in one way or another, make this DEMO available to all of you who won't be able to try it at Gamescom. While it's not fully representative of DayZ as the hardcore survival game it should be (and technically only works in a "LAN" mode as well), we understand that everybody just wants to get their hands on the new player controller!

More importantly though, we have plans for extensive online coverage of all the things we're about to show at Gamescom. Just to pick a few that will happen right during the Gamescom week: we&'ll be live on the Twitch Gamescom stage for about 15 minutes, talking about the DEMO and DayZ BETA in detail, including some gameplay. We'll have a couple of media appointments that will hopefully produce some cool articles, and we'll also be producing our own photos or possibly even some basic video content directly from the show floor.

Now, creating (audio)visual content of any upcoming game changes is always a struggle. With the way our community-driven development works (the moment we have a "legit" build in our hands that we need your feedback on, we drop it to Experimental), it is sometimes literally impossible to even play the internal branch of DayZ for several minutes straight, and prepare content in advance.

This has been the case with the supporting content we're making for Gamescom, and over the last two weeks, it produced some rather hilarious clips:

While those GIFs may look like a lot of fun, the reality is that any bug like that always breaks the gameplay, not to mention the recorded clip or screenshot. Count in some nasty crashes, network issues or general server degradation we still need to resolve, and you have a good reason for our Status Reports rarely including any relevant visual content at all.

It's also why we're still relatively far from dropping any BETA package to the public Steam branches - while our new player character (and other systems) already work well within the limited scope of the Gamescom DEMO, they are not ready for the full-scale DayZ experience just yet.

Well, that'll do it for today - I hope this helped some of you to get an insight on what's happening around the DayZ office. Baty should have some more details about our upcoming Gamescom coverage!

P.S. - please do let us know if you're coming to Cologne, and come hang out with us!

- Martin Čulák/ Brand Manager

Community Spotlight

Hello guys,

We have two weeks till Gamescom and in our office, as in many other gamedev offices around the world, we're preparing for the game show, and we are starting to panic a bit. There is still so much to be done! I spent the last two weeks working on videos, which should be done before Gamescom, but as Martin wrote above, the game is still not in an ideal shape. Therefore, we tried to make the best of the actual unstable version to be able to show you some of the new features which you will be able to experience at Gamescom. I will not try to hide that it is very challenging to capture scenes without any errors and bugs, be we are close to finish and the video should be ready for Gamescom.

In any case, Gamescom is near and the mood in the Dev Team can be best described as:

But enough of silly things. Let’s take a look at what is waiting for us in the next couple of weeks.

Next Thursday 17th August at 17:30 CEST (GMT+1) you can look forward to a stream from our Bohemia Interactive office. We would like to share more information about what you can expect in our booth at Gamescom, we will tell you more about a demo we are preparing and also about a community meet-up which will be organized at Gamescom. We will talk in more detail about BETA and answer some questions. And this time, we will have moderators and better sound, so it will surely be better than last time! But the stream will not be only about DayZ. We will talk more about other BI projects, like Mini DAYZ, Ylands and Arma 3. Do not miss this stream; you can learn a lot of new information there!

Simultaneously with the stream, we will host a small event. It will be a battle of the castle again, where we will return to the Middle Ages and play as knights. The event will take place on 17th August at 17:00 CEST (GMT+1) and you can be part of it if you are interested. You can sing up HERE.

And now back to the Gamescom[www.gamescom-cologne.com].It will be held between 23rd and 26th August at Cologne in Germany. As I said in previous Status Report, we will be there, specifically in hall 10.1., booth A010. Beside DayZ team, we will also have Ylands and Arma teams there. You will be able to play the Gamescom DEMO about which the devs were already talking above.

More information about the demo will be revealed at the stream next week. I want to point out that the DayZ and Arma parts will be separated from public area and will only be accessible for adults 18+. But don’t worry if you are not 18 yet. You can come visit us at the community meet-up in front of our booth, talk with the devs and get some gifts. Community meet-up will take place on 25th August at 13:00 CEST, so don’t hesitate to come, we will be happy to see you. And if you come in DayZ cosplay, you will make us even happier!

For those of you that cannot make it to this year’s Gamescom, let me assure you again: we are preparing reports, videos and photos. Don’t forget to follow our social media channels!

Finally, we will have a look at some of your creations.

First, I would like to present you a member of Spanish community who is playing on role-play server DayZRP and is sharing his adventures on his YouTube channel. His last video is "La masacre" and as the title suggests, it is about a massacre in Lopatino’s church. There are English subtitles for those who do not understand Spanish. I really like the story and what I like even more is the amazing comic that accompanies the video.

Further on, I was pleasantly surprised by a community member paulmosin, who is sending his ideas of a real world survivor to our Twitter.

We love him!

On Reddit, I discovered a post by user SpectreRobin. It is a DayZ picture, painted on 3 canvases, which is inspired by a well-known screenshot[imgur.com]. It was drawn by his friend, who is a very talented artist. It reminds me of paintings in our office[www.instagram.com] (which I would very much like to take home) and we can be only jealous that he has such a nice decoration on his walls.

Thank you very much for all your content that you share with us on our official social networks, we really appreciate it. We will have to move the next status report to 29th August, because it would be right in the Gamescom week and we will not be able to prepare it while at the convention. But as I wrote above, we will be definitely sharing the photos, experiences and impressions with you the whole week. So make sure to follow us and we are looking forward to seeing you on the stream, and at Gamescom!

This week, we're keeping it short and sweet with Eugen, Adam and Baty, as the rest of the team got their hands full with work on major 0.63 tasks. Eugen actually shares more on why we've been quieter than usual the last few Status Reports, and sets some expectations regarding BETA release schedule. Adam is reporting on the ongoing tireless work of the environment team, showcasing some of their recent achievements, and Baty closes off with a little teaser of an upcoming live stream - along with sharing awesome community content, of course! Let's get to it folks.

Contents This Week

Dev Update/Eugen

Dev Update/Adam

Community Spotlight

Dev Update/Eugen

In BETA we trust, deliver we must. A catchphrase that I've seen on one of our whiteboards a couple weeks ago perfectly summarizes how we as a team feel right now.

We know things haven't been perfect and that the experience that we wanted to provide has not always been consistent with our vision. Technology debt that we have been fighting held us in fairly firm grip where we quickly realized that providing short term solutions over and over isn't going to cut it.

We had to rethink and go back to the drawing board multiple times to start making a fun game. We knew the solutions needed but the time investment was huge with lot of risks ahead. Which is where a lot of the development kept getting slowed down by the complexity of the engine changes that were needed, as well as unexpected issues that kept changing the landscape before us.

It was a risky move that we hope will keep the game alive going forward and bring back those that might have been turned away by the state of the game. As we truly believe that what you players want and we meant to deliver wasn’t doable with the technology we had.

There are players out there who are patiently waiting, while playing the game in a state that it is in now, others who wait for the full release or some who come back every once in a while to see what changed. Some are more invested than others, they read our channels, think about consequences of what we talk about, and some just want to see it in action. As the BETA is becoming a fleshed out reboot of the game all of us wanted, we plan to have a limited playable build at Gamescom this year. We're doing everything we can to make it available at the Bohemia Interactive booth for the visitors to try it out.

The sole focus of this build is gunplay and player movement on an edited version of Chernarus prepared especially for the purpose of this demo. That is why a lot of our efforts have been looking at the flow of player actions, controls and consistency of their outcome. The team will be there in person to discuss the details with those interested. Feedback is the most important thing and we can't wait to see people play it and smoothen the rough edges.

Now that also means that the next couple of weeks are fully focused on the content of the Gamescom demo, so that there are no major hurdles when fans in Cologne get their hands on it. All departments are trying to iron out the details as much as they can, so that we can have fun with in Germany.

For the first BETA update itself, there is no release date yet.We don't want to let you down unless we're absolutely sure it's coming. The Gamescom demo work itself still counts towards the overall development of course, but we're not ready to put that version of the game on any of the public Steam branches - simply because the feature set of our demo will be limited and does not represent the complete DayZ experience.

To finish things off, let's take a look at a list of things the team is tackling now:

Programmers

Weapon actions

Vehicle controller refactor

Basic state machines and script classes tweaks

Melee combat preparation (programming wise)

Central Loot Economy tweaks

Physics and optimization tweaks

New animation system for zombies

Bug fixing

Animators

MoCap session preparation

Animal animations

Weapon animations

Designers

Melee combat (script wise)

Aiming model

Weapons handling

Inventory UI refactor (crafting, character)

Advanced placing system

New player and item spawn definition

Audio

Sounds for weapon interactions

QA

Playtesting the 0.62 update

Internal client stabilization

New animations/weapons functionality testing

Art

Gamescom map preparation

Old assets rework

Fire mode selector for weapons

Object layout for western region

- Eugen Harton / Lead Producer

Dev Update/Adam

As we mentioned in earlier status reports, our efforts on improving graphical fidelity does not end with the update 00.62. With such massive change for the environment that update 0.62 has brought, one of the most important things for us is to get the environment right color-wise. That means getting lighting config right and having all assets in our environment properly configured (material and texture wise).

We have already released an update for grass color for 0.62 on June 21 and since then our environment designer Mark has been working tirelessly on another iteration, this time focused mainly on changing another important piece of this whole color puzzle - satellite texture. You know this texture very well, because it is the one that you see whenever you look into the distance (and also texture, that is commonly used on community-made maps, that helps you in travels through Chernarus).

Since Chernarus was originally made for Arma 2 and DayZ version has been built on top of it, it also uses satellite texture from this version. The texture was unfortunately nowhere near to being consistent in the beginning (in terms of the way details were made or in used color pallete) and with the additional things added on top of it in DayZ (northern, western expansion, settlement rework,..), this problem was only deepened.

With the update 0.62, we felt that it is the time we finally look at this problem and make sure satellite texture for the new Chernarus uses somewhat consistent color pallete and looks good both in old and new areas. This change was also particularly important for us with update 0.62 since satellite texture affects colors of grass and ground textures. Now, do not expect that suddenly, a texture that has 15360x15360 pixels will be great in every detail, but the work that has been done so far is a huge step forward and will be good starting point for any additions and improvements.

BEFORE[i.imgur.com]

AFTER[i.imgur.com]

With satellite texture changes of such scale, another pass on colors of grass and bushes/trees was inevitable (to basically bring close and far LOD visuals in-line with colors on new satellite texture plus several issues with material configuration were also fixed). And since all that was purely a data change, we felt that it would be shame not to include it for update 0.62, too. And so all of the changes are now available on Experimental Branch for you to check out.

And I do have also some bonus pictures for you this time - work has progressed on western border of Chernarus. Currently, detailed object layout is being worked on in areas west of Zelonogorsk. First two pictures show new settlement, called Zvir. Third shows Orlye ozero with mountain Velikyj Kotel rising behind. Now please keep in mind that content on these pictures is work-in-progress. If you want to read more about the planned changes on western border, check out the last status report[dayz.com].

[i.imgur.com]

[i.imgur.com]

[i.imgur.com]

- Adam Francu / Senior map designer

Dev Update/Community Spotlight

Two weeks have passed and it is time again to take a look at what is happening in the community. At first, I would like to talk about an important event which is ahead of us this summer and that is Gamescom. We've been preparing for it for several months and it is very important to us, because we will meet you – the community, and at the same time, we want to show you something new. If you are planning to be at Gamescom, we will be glad to see you. You will find our booth in hall 10.1, where we will be among other Bohemia Interactive games. Also, for the Friday 25th, we are preparing a small meet & greet with developers, including small gifts for you. Cosplayers are welcome! We will tell you more on a live stream before Gamescom, which we are also preparing at the moment and which you definitely should not miss.

Recently, I was playing DayZ when I got a message from streamer Issy telling me she can’t wait to show me what she made. And she sent a picture of shoes she painted in DayZ style! Simply awesome! I had to share that with you.

When browsing through DayZ videos, this DayZ-inspired rap caught my eye, made by DayZ Standalone - Jiveturkey600. He created it on a request from one of the fans, who wanted a song from zombie point of view.

Today I would like to focus on an international fan group on Facebook - DayZ Standalone Community, which has over 13000 members. People show off their accomplishments there, look for others to play with or share their own creations. It was this group where I found Mark Duncan Copland’s post showing postcards he receives from his friend Michael. It is amazing to see how DayZ became an important part of your friendship!

[i.imgur.com]

[i.imgur.com]

[i.imgur.com]

Another thing that got my attention in this group was a bar in Birmingham, UK, run by Jessica Mitchel who, as a true fan, decorated the bar windows with DayZ style stickers.

[i.imgur.com]

[i.imgur.com]

I would like to invite you to a RP event on the Aftermath server which will take place next Wednesday. What is it about?

"Scientists have been carrying out experiments on the residents of Svetlojarsk. Slowly the residents started to notice people becoming sick and ‘turning.’ Information was leaked to the residents that scientists were going to visit the city to see the final result. The remaining residents held a secret meeting, they bought weapons off the black market and planned to capture the scientists to demand a vaccine for their friends and family. Worried that there may not be enough to go around, the civilians not only intended to capture the scientists but also kill anyone else who knew about the virus!"

If the story got you interested, don’t not forget to sing up, because the server is whitelisted. You can find more information on their web pages[aftermathdayzrp.com].

As a last thing, I wanted to show you a beautiful screenshot of the town of Novodmitrovsk in an unusual resolution made by Reddit user NeuroticEUROtic. It is definitely worth sharing!

[i.imgur.com]

That is all from me for today. Make sure not to miss the next Status Report, where we will give you more information about the upcoming stream and Gamescom. Enjoy the summer!

Good afternoon Survivors,This week, the summer holiday is in full swing in Prague and Bratislava, which means that some of our developers are enjoying a well deserved vacation, while the others are super busy keeping the development process going. This unfortunately means that our Status Report will be rather brief and dry this time, but as always, we managed to come up with some interesting bits and pieces on what's happening behind the scenes. The main topic this week is the much discussed introduction of server browser tabs. Adam and the environment team is looking at all the settlements across Chernarus, and meanwhile, our friends over at the Bohemia mobile team released Mini DAYZ on mobile devices. It was quite the success to say the least! Let's get to it now, shall we?

Contents This Week

Dev Update/Hicks

Dev Update/Eugen

Dev Update/Adam

Dev Update/Martin

Community Spotlight

Dev Update/Hicks

Greetings Survivors!

This Status Report, I had something short and sweet for you. I wanted to take the opportunity to address adaptation to changes, and changes coming forward in general.

I know some of you were confused about the changes to the server browser we mentioned in previous Status Reports, and it raised a small concern for me when it comes to larger changes in the future. The changes to the server browser organization are absolutely vital for the final product of DayZ. I know it might seem confusing now but we, as developers need to look at the bigger picture.

Presenting the new user with the intended, vanilla experience of DayZ is absolutely critical. If a new user hits the play button, they should be paired with the best candidate official server. If a user looks at the server browser, they absolutely should be presented with Official Bohemia Interactive servers. Servers that present the experience we have laid out, and that we know won't be resetting storage, and will all be on the same central infrastructure.

I fully realize that now it might seem confusing to some, and now it might not seem to make sense based off of the current state of the build - but I promise you, it makes sense in the long run. I'm also aware of concerns with regards to some official servers going offline and people losing their camps, and I promise you - this is something that will be looked at, to ensure user progress and protection from unintended player progression loss.

As far as other changes moving forward, the sheer nature of how you interact with the world and the gameplay systems involved in it will inherently change. Simply put, things just flat out operate differently. Not only do all of these extensive changes coming in 0.63 and beyond allow us to bring DayZ to be the experience we want it to be, it also allows us to get rid of nasty pesky issues related to the previous system limitations. Be it addressing the nasty "apple spam" or the frustrating deaths at short heights, or even duplication through abuse of animation system glitches. I'm not saying this will resolve every issue present, but it puts us in a position to be able to more easily, and more stabily resolve these issues.

That's really all I had for you guys for this Status Report, but keep in mind - no one is looking forward to playing 0.63 on Steam more then us, the developers.

- Brian Hicks / Creative Director

Dev Update/Eugen

DayZ has always been a bit of a hybrid MMO - a combination of character and world persistence where instances act like shards themselves, and the official set of servers focusing on the "vanilla experience" - with the future expectation of additional variety with customizable modded servers.

By being that open, we closed some doors for us to go full on on that notion of a never-ending progression in an online world - one that games like Destiny or The Division utilize. On the other hand, we still want to keep the idea that allows one player to spend a life of multiple characters across these shards, and have the variety of these different experiences that are consistent with our vision.

As Brian has explained today, and in previous Status Reports, I just want to say that the main idea behind the recent tab separation is to maintain two separate worlds for our players. The "vanilla" one where you can expect a consistent experience, and the community one, where (when the BETA hits) you'll see a large variety of different gameplay and tweaks, with as much information as we can provide on the types of changes you'll experience there.

Our goal is not to hide these community experiences, but only to show and highlight the difference. I understand that majority of people play on private servers nowadays, as there is more of that curation as to what happens there, and the dangers of vanilla where anything can happen might not be suitable for everybody. But we do believe that giving a choice and information about these differences will be crucial going forward when server files are released.

You'll get a large variety of gameplay and setups, and less of a curated community vanilla experience that we at Bohemia will focus on. We expect that community will supply different maps, PvP modes, roleplay, and more. DayZ mod is a good experience to look back on as it has spawned multiple mods and changes, while vanilla experience attracted less and less of the player focus over time - which is understandable. As you spend hundreds of hours there, and want to try new things in this never ending world. We want to see the same thing with less hassle around doing so. You want to play a mod, we want you to see what that mod is, make the flow of playing without any obstruction, and we want to highlight these different experiences for players seeking them.

I also want to touch upon the subject of 0.62 development, as it's slowly closing up with a last couple of critical fixes getting merged in, such as crash fixes. When we move on, we want to be sure that your experience is as stable as it can be, within the limits of knowing that everything is going to change when BETA hits. All these small things will help us with this huge transition.

As I have said multiple times, we believe that we have something great ahead of us that will realize the vision all of us had for what sometimes feels as forever. So yes, we are now focusing on combat first and foremost in our internal version - and we want to share that with you as soon as possible. There are multiple build reviews every week, as we march towards this long awaited goal.

To give a glance at the currently open development items in our teams:

Programmers

Vehicle controller refactor

New animation system for infected

Animation events for player

Communication systems optimization

Mosin 1930 basic state machine and script class

MP 133 basic state machine and script class

MP5 basic state machine and script class

CLE (Central Loot Economy) tweaks

Physics and optimization tweaks

Bug fixing

Animators

M4A1 animations

Player turns for pistols

Unarmed & one hit reactions

Player graph fixes

IK (Inverse Kinematics) poses

Designers

New player and item spawn definition

Player action targeting and floating cursor

User actions in multiplayer

Advanced placing system

Inventory UI refactor (crafting, character)

Aiming model

Melee combat targeting

Traps with grenades

Weapons handling

Audio

Bug fixing

Sounds for animals

QA

Playtesting the 0.62 update

0.62 feature testing

Internal client stabilization

CLE testing

Art

Old assets rework

Detailed object layout for western border (locations west of Lopatino)

NWAF overhaul

Location names revision

- Eugen Harton / Lead Producer

Dev Update/Adam

With .62 update being on stable branch for over a month now, we have pretty much transitioned strictly to goals for the update 0.63 and onward. Primary focus being the overhaul of the North West Airfield, finalisation of tourist trails and additional locations on the western border of Chernarus (along with overall tweaks to the area).

In this status report, I would like touch a bit on the topic of the plans on western border - where we are going with the changes and additions that we work on now. Our aim is to preserve its wilderness look. We wont be populating this part of the map with lots of settlements like we did on north. Instead of that, we are focusing on adding more lonely locations such as lodges, tourist destinations (tourist trails will be extended to western border) and industrial/farm locations.

That being said, western border is quite a huge area by itself, and so it would be a shame to not to include anything that would resemble a settlement. There are currently three tiny settlements in the works, most of them composed of few houses scattered around without some structures like you are used to in the mainland of South Zagoria. Following pictures show one particular settlement located just south of the new castle that has been added in update 0.62 (and already received more details and polish now!).

Please keep in mind that these pictures show work-in-progress content:

[i.imgur.com]

[i.imgur.com]

And just to give you an idea, how we imagine some lonely locations, here is a screenshot of lonely lodge somewhere on the western border:

[i.imgur.com]

Now I would like to give you some names instead of using "new castle" or "new settlement", but the truth is that we have to yet figure out some proper names. This is particularly important for the finalization of tourist trails task, and so in addition to mentioned map tasks, we are also in the process of revisiting all location names that are currently used on Chernarus, along with figuring out names for new locations or locations that are worth naming and were not yet named.

Goal of this revision is to also make sure names are somewhat consistent between each other and fit the overall theme of Chernarus. There are over 230 entries (names for settlements, terrain features,..) that we currently work with, but luckily, we've got help from Ivan Buchta - one of the key members of the team behind the Chernarus for Arma 2, to make sure we do not deviate from the original naming rules and that you all will be able to call parts of the map with proper local names[/u] :).

- Adam Franců / Senior map designer

Dev Update/Martin

While we're still very much on hold with pushing any release buttons for DayZ on PC and consoles (as the development is breezing towards BETA), I'm more than happy to share some of the excitment that's currently flowing through the veins of everyone at the Bohemia mobile team. On July 3rd, after some time of soft launch testing, they finally launched the iOS and Android versions of Mini DAYZ worldwide!

Being 100% free to play (there's no catch, no in-app purchases or hidden transactions - it's just free, plain and simple!), Mini DAYZ stays true to the survival heritage of DayZ standalone (and the mod) by being incredibly unforgiving. It's something that I personally find very refreshing, especially on the mobile games market, which somehow always leans towards very casual and clichéd genres.

The good thing is, I am probably not alone, as Mini DAYZ has been occupying top positions in appstore charts across the worold ever since it launched on July 3 - which is well, well deserved, even more so when you realize that Mini DAYZ was originally just a fan made project! Hats off to our mobile team, and especially to Mike Azovskikh, the original creator of Mini DAYZ for web browsers who spearheded the development of mobile versions here at Bohemia!

I encourage you to download Mini DAYZ on AppStore[itunes.apple.com] or Google Play - for now, it's single player only, but still offers a very entertaining balance of healthy frustration and fun :).

Well, that's it from me today - the next time I'm doing a Status Report, it will actually be related to that one DayZ that you all really care about. Gamescom is getting very close... but for now, let's see what Baty has for you this week!

- Martin Čulák / Brand Manager

Community Spotlight

Hello Survivors!

First thing I would like to address today is the new server browser. It seemed to confuse you a bit, because a lot of you were struggling to find your favorite community servers.

When you launch DayZ and open the server browser, you will find yourselves on the Official servers tab. If you select the „favorited“ checkbox, only the official servers which you have added to your favourites will be displayed. If you change to Community tab and select „favorited“, you will see your favorite Community servers only.

It's so simple!

And now, we will look at two of your videos. Wobo did a couple of tests and prepared 30 tips for update 0.62, which you may have not heard about previously. Make sure to check it out, you could be surprised.

Some of you will surely be familiar with the name TheLonelyBandit. Last year, he decided to create a challenge video, where he was getting food and water only from people he mugged. He returned to it now and his video where he attacked a really nice guy entertained me a lot. Watch him survive without the usual supply of food a water!

A lot of interesting stories develop on the DayZUnderground servers thanks to organic role-play without rules. Stories of ordinary people trying to survive, as well as faction members who are not afraid to take your possessions and your life. Short articles "Humans of Chernarus[imgur.com]" will allow you to look inside the mind of such people.

[imgur.com]

And again, we have another peak into our office:

[www.instagram.com]

That is all from me and as always, if you have any interesting content, which you would like to share with us, tweet it on our official Twitter profile.

This week, everyone's super busy with actual development work on 0.63, but Brian, Eugen, Viktor and Martin still managed to share some exciting bits and pieces - we're addressing our old development roadmaps, share some of our intended design on game economy, tease a couple of new gesture animations, and also discuss some of our communication related news (including an Instagram account!). Let's get to it.

Dev Update/Hicks

Dev Update/Eugen

Dev Update/Viktor

Dev Update/Martin

Community Spotlight

Dev Update/Hicks

Greetings Survivors.

This week, I don't have too much for you, as a great deal of everything I've been so excited to work with Peter on over the last few years is entirely dependant upon the successful implementation of DayZ's new spine („DayZ 2.0“ as Peter lovingly referred to it in our 0.62 Developer Live Stream). This Status Report, I wanted to talk the opportunity during the wait for BETA to clarify a few points about our in game economy, and the continuing work that Peter, our programmer Frantisek, myself, and others are putting into it.

Everyone on the dev team sees the same issues as everyone else. Buildings with repeated spawns of the same item in some situations, some items ending up clustering in one region of the map, helicopter crashes not spawning firearms (psuedo-intentional currently), and of course the availability of early game supplies.

BETA isn't just about the new animation system, and related components. The programmers responsible for the central economy have reached the end of what they can do on 0.62, and a lot of work to address some of these issues has actually been done, but is on the 0.63 branch.

Obviously this will need some testing and iteration to get it to where we want it - but I wanted everyone that follows developement of DayZ to be aware of the fact that we do know, and that we want it to improve as much as you all do. Heli crashes should spawn firearms, hell some of the stuff we have coming in the pipe has been discussed as clearly being dynamic event spawns only - so that people have to hunt these items down and can't just go to a static location to find them.

There are many small details to DayZ that have a ripple impact on all connected points of gameplay, and the economy is a perfect example of this. Without it functioning properly, all the fancy improvements, fluid character movement, enhanced visuals and so on won't matter because the new player to DayZ won't be able to feel like they can learn, and master the world. They won't feel empowered early on to take on the challenges of surviving in Chernarus, if they can't understand how to find basic supplies.

I could ramble on about this for hours, but I'll save you all that wall of text - Eugen, Peter, and Viktor will take it from here. I look forward to seeing you all in Chernarus, be it on 0.62 or beyond!

- Brian Hicks / Creative Director

Dev Update/Eugen

Hi everyone! Since this week, everybody is really swamped with actual development work, I'll try to fill in for the lack of cool visuals or exciting new feature documentation and reflect upon some of our past decisions on the technology side of things.

With the mindset of developing technology first to enable our vision for DayZ platform, we have gone through number of changes internally. Things were cut, changed, deprecated and sometimes reintroduced to get a good and fun anti-game first and foremost. However, all the work that was necessary to achieve this vision has shown us how large our technological debt was at the time. All that lead to plans that were clashing heavily with how fast we were able to remove the debt, and we ended up prototyping a lot of our vision in old technology to see what works, and what does not.

We have shown a number of roadmaps that have proved to be a failure on our part. Anticipating, or predicting the effect that the technology debt can have on development speed is a very hard endeavor - and we have learned the hard way. It has always been a good plan longterm for both the game and the company. But we all do believe that what DayZ is supposed to be has not been achieved yet, and we plan to deliver on that notion.

For years, we have worked with the best intentions on a good technology base for all features that this sandbox would largely benefit from. Going forward, we want to start sharing some of the internal documents to show what that means to us, how it fits within BETA and full release. We anticipate a lot of features will make it to the first BETA release of DayZ on this new technology base, meaning that the things that we haven't been possible to fix, change, improve, or make at all will get the much needed spark and detail.

It's perhaps not going to be one big swoop for every single part of the game, but it certainly feels like playing a new DayZ. We hope that this will show the possibilities of our new technology and inspire modders alike to be far more ambitious with their goals.

If you look at the gameplay of DayZ, one of the main and core pillars of it is the player itself. We have created mindmaps on design side that help us with the longterm vision of how (and where) the player interacts with the enviroment, or with the game. The graph you see below shows the base of what new player should be able to do by 1.0, with most features being available during BETA.

And that’s only the overview of the player character interactions, not mentioning other features (say, base building) or the infected. DayZ is truly vast in scope, and there is a lot to go through, but starting here is important.

I think you (the players) and we (the developers) want the same thing. There will be differences here and there, don't get me wrong. But we share the idea of having a multiplayer sandbox with apocalyptic background that’s unforgiving, immersive and gets your heart beating when these scenarios you have been imagining in your head become possible. We want this technology to allow just that. To serve as platform for a game where you get into these intense situations, or maybe just sit down at a fire with a friend. Where it feels almost real.

We know what the game should be, we didn’t want to be held down by constraints of past, and have chosen to do our best and get the limits out of the way. I don't want to sound like a broken record, I just really want to play this thing with you guys and get lost in Chernarus again.

- Eugen Harton / Lead Producer

Dev Update/Viktor

Hi everyone!

I'll be very short this time as we're still working hard on player character and firearms animations. What I can tease today is a couple of GIFs with some upcoming new gestures that I was talking about in my recent Status Reports. These new animations include military gestures, as well as new taunts. Here is the preview of some of them:

- Viktor Kostik/ Lead Designer

Dev Update/Martin

Survivors, I have a brief update for you from our small marketing/community department within the DayZ Dev Team and Bohemia Interactive. As some of you may know, we set ourselves a goal to improve the DayZ website and make it (much like DayZ itself) more modern, functional, and fun to use in general. It's the single most important communication channel that we have to engage with our community, and it deserves our attention for sure.

On the related forums thread[forums.dayz.com], we've been collecting your feedback on our website, and the Bohemia Interactive online services team has succesfuly implemented some of your ideas (like having a proper search function, or tags to quickly sort through content). While there is still a lot of work to do on the actual content of the website, you can already check out a preview of the general design direction the DayZ.com website will be taking: our friends over at the Bohemia Interactive Mobile Team have announced the release of Mini DAYZ on mobile devices (3rd of July, save the date!) and their new website at http://www.minidayz.com/shares some of the basic design elements that we will be using at DayZ.com as well.

Other than that, we are getting ready to keep everyone well informed while our developers are doing all the hard work on the first BETA build. What lies ahead of us is probably one of the greatest challanges that we have faced in terms of communication - we need to do our best to keep your interest high with no other major updates scheduled for release before BETA, and at the same time, we need to make sure that the world knows that DayZ is still alive, and very much kicking when BETA happens. As Eugen mentioned, some of our past estimates were not quite right, and it's always the bad news that stays in everyone's minds.

In general, do expect more of what we did for the 0.62 release (video content like the 0.62 Update Overview, and the 0.62 Developer Live Stream), and be ready to play a huge role in all that - our community is one of the three pillars that support everything we do at Bohemia after all.

That's all from me, let's see what Baty has for you this week! I think she mentioned something about us having an Instagram account... :)

- Martin Čulák/ Brand Manager

Community Spotlight

Hello guys! I want to thank you for all the feedback on the newest Stable update. It took us long time but we are really happy we found a fix for the annoying memory crash.

Let's take a look at the official forums. We have instructions how to fix an issue with Steam overlay when using MSI Afterburner. If you are using this software take a look HERE [forums.dayz.com].

I must say I saw one of the best DayZ screenshots ever this week. DrDeSync is a very talented man and has a way with interesting situations. Check out his latest screenshot named "Keep Your Eyes Peeled":

What Community Spotlight would it be without some nice community video! Mr_Beardman made a story of escaping from a horde of infected on the Aftermath role-play server. Check it out!

Are you on Instagram, Survivors? I personally love it and so I created our official DayZ Instagram account[www.instagram.com]. There, you can occasionaly find some photos from our office and more, just follow us!

[www.instagram.com]

This is everything for my part, I hope you like it! If you have any content that you would like to see on the next Status Report, just share it on our Twitter and you can be here next time!

While all the players' attention is now turned to E3 in Los Angeles, we are at the office working hard on further updates. Brian will outline our decisions about the distribution of servers for the future, Mirek will show you how close-range combat and camera collision look in 0.63, and Victor is talking about gun animations. Let's have a look!

Contents This Week

Dev Update/Hicks

Dev Update/Eugen

Dev Update/Peter

Dev Update/Mirek

Dev Update/Viktor

Dev Update/Adam

Community Spotlight

Dev Update/Hicks

Greetings Survivors,

I thought this Status Report would be a perfect time to clarify some things with the hive, and the server browser for those that may have missed me speaking about it in 2016. I'm sure some of you may have noticed that the production team recently made the move to separate the Official DayZ servers into their own section of the hive, independent from the community hosted public servers. (Albeit with some difficulty on the game server provider side of properly configuring those community rented publics). One of the things Peter and I sat down and talked about when we looked at how we wanted the server browser to look moving into Beta and beyond, was making it crystal clear for new and existing users what servers were official, and what were user run (as well as modded, of course). Tied into this was a need to divide progression made on user hosted servers from progression on the official DayZ experience. Allowing folks to rent servers introduced a good deal of potential methods to exploit how localized server storage operates, which in turn can flood the public hive with ill-gotten gear. Trying to tackle this by limiting what can be done on the hosting side in the end just limits more and more what those server operators can do, and puts an unneeded responsibility on the limited support resources that are available.

For me (and I think I can safely say for Peter as well) we needed to be certain what the initial experience a new user to DayZ would be experiencing. From a design perspective, it is very hard to be certain exactly what new users are encountering if we aren't clearly presenting them with a straight path to an official experience the first time they play the game. Sure, naming conventions for official servers worked okay for a bit - but at a certain point it just turns into tribal knowledge. The users who have been around for a while, or those who came from the mod understand, but new users can find it daunting. This is why when putting together the first mockups of the new server browser we made sure to earmark a few things:

Separating Official, Community, and Modded servers into their own tabs

Splitting the Official Servers off from the rest of the public hive to be certain the experience in them comes from them alone

Maintaining the public hive on rented servers to continue that tradition of a shared character across many DayZ servers

When the new server browser finally gets to the point in which these tabs are in and functional, the whole layout will make much more sense to existing and new users. The first thing they (new users) should experience is DayZ exactly as the developers had intended it. Obviously, if said new user has friends on a community or modded server he/she can navigate there easily. I know it seems like a small thing in the grand scheme of the whole project, and probably fairly trivial given the massive undertaking that beta is with the animation system, new user actions, and so on - but the devil is in the details and as far as I'm concerned, we as a development team needed to take steps to make it easier to understand, and get into the official Bohemia Interactive run experience. Allow folks to easily know what servers they can be certain persistence isn't reset on, and so forth.

The rest of the team will have more interesting and exciting things to talk about this week I'm sure - but I wanted to make sure I took time to address these in progress changes to the organization of the hive, and its intent.

- Brian Hicks / Creative Director

Dev Update/Eugen

Hey Guys,

0.62 has hit stable and we tried to livestream after a longer period of time to start practicing for what lies ahead. Hope you liked it! The strike team for this patch will join rest of our efforts here and march on with BETA tasks forward. That said, for 0.62 you can expect a bit more fixes to the most crucial issues that we can reasonably look into, rolling them to experimental and stable over time. Some of the changes I`ve seen today to coloring of the map and vegetation are amazing. I`m very happy with the visuals that guys have been able to produce. Were also looking into server crashes from storage (persistance) corruption, vehicle tweaks and server browser separation as mentioned by Brian. But there are limits to what we can offer in reasonable time for the old client.

The track for BETA has moved forward and keeps its focus on weapons and gunplay. So discussions on handling particles, state machines and weapon manipulation are always happening around the office with all people handling their parts of the game in all the features that are on their way for BETA.

Since there is not that much to report in terms of scope or change of focus. I'll share some interesting stories or problems we have been dealing with in the past two weeks. One of the bigger issues that is bothering us right now is tied to animation of weapons. As the technology changes you have details that can only be built when rest of the modules are in place and testable. Looking at the internal build of the game there are some funny bugs all around the new stuff that one might get a good laugh from but there is no way they can make it live.

While player is animating properly and even uses inverse kinematics in the new modules, configs are getting set up, player turns are tweaked. There are elements on weapons that need to be animated as well. It's one of the older parts of the engine originally and if any of the modders remember. Animating proxies on weapons have been done through configuration files and in text. We're moving away from that, but because how tied it is to some of the not refactored parts we are encountering some interesting things from parts of weapons flying around to being invisible at times. There apparently is still something left that has not been identified properly and we need to solve it as soon as possible. Refactoring something as large as RV engine certainly has its challenges and these things are hard to predict with codebase that old.

Even from a knowhow standpoint it's not about the skills of the programmer himself, but rather the lack of documentation or knowledge how the previous system has been setup, and why. And as such the debugging of these issues takes time and going forward we want to eliminate as much of the smaller details that are still set up the old way. Its hours of research and digging from unknown code. And some of you might have a experience doing that.

On the other hand were also battling the stability of the application itself. As all of you have been plagued by memory crashes, which are very hard to diagnose properly and fix. I have stories of similar issues even taking a year to debug from different projects I had pleasure working with. However were very much focusing on it with internal build as even the development environment gets very frustrating when you can`t iterate without crash sneaking up on you at random times.

Funny thing is when you look at callstacks from these crashes, they usually just end up in memory sensitive parts of the engine, but the actual issue might have happened minutes before. And tracking it down is an enormous undertaking. We're not taking these issues lightly as for BETA none of these hard stoppers should be present.

To give a glance at the currently open development items in our teams:

As we want to accent official DayZ experience vs community one in long run, we separated shards for official and community servers with release of the 0.62 version. Now with upcoming update for 0.62 you will see this change reflected in server browser too. Instead of one 'Internet' tab there are now two tabs to make it clear. First 'Official' tab with all servers operated directly by Bohemia Interactive, while second 'Community' tab pools all servers rented by users.

Further work is being made on crafting system. Now, with item in hands, it's possible to initiate crafting and choose between recipes directly looking at another item in the world, or from the quick bar by holding a slot where said item is assigned. Such possibilities for crafting will help to minimize inventory use. On the other side of core features spectrum, we are working hard in close cooperation with animators and programmers on ranged and melee combat. Focus is currently mostly on the aiming model for firearms (weapon handling part is being worked on in parallel of course), which is combination of hands IK, character turns, it ensures that weapon is always pointing what you are looking at, that model also handles sights misalignment, sway which could be modified by character state from modifiers to stamina and hold breath, and recoil modified by weapon's attachments. Light and heavy hit impacts are now connected to hit events and are played character being hit from both types of combat. We would like to add one more hit impact to the mix which is a knockdown to the ground at the end of combo. You can read more about upcoming new melee combat in one of past Status Reports[dayz.com]. I will get back to firearms in more detail in some upcoming Status Reports.

Do you remember that injured animation shown in our official DayZ Early Access launch trailer from the end of 2013? We finally plugged in the injured set of animations to the new character and it directly reflects your health state. Additionally, we also added exhausted idle animation which is connected to the stamina system. With these changes, we are getting closer to our ideal state where it should be easy to observe other character to see what they are actually doing and to judge their overall condition.

Believe what you see... see you in Chernarus folks!

- Peter Nespesny / Lead Designer

Dev Update/Mirek

First of all, I would like to write about the 0.62 branch state. We have received some important data about client and server crashes, which should help us to stabilize the build present on the stable branch, so hopefully there will be stability improvements soon. We have also merged the fix candidate for floating vehicles and very important physics optimization. Currently, physics is consuming most of the CPU resources (at least on servers), so we hope this optimization will significantly improve server performance. These merges will be available on experimental branch today or tomorrow and we will be very happy if there will be enough players, so we will be able to confirm that this optimization is working well.

On 0.63 - we're cooperating closely with designers and animators. The most of work goes into weapon manipulation now. This basically means we're creating new finite states machines for handling the weapon logic and connecting all weapon manipulation animations into these state machines. If everything goes right, we will show you how firing, reloading, chambering, unjamming and other mechanics look in the next status report.

Another big part of the game - close range fight - is in progress. You saw some animations before, today I would like to show you how first hit animations are looking.

Please keep in mind we're showing work in progress state, things can change during development and it's very likely that all these features will be tweaked also in the beta stage of development.

- Miroslav Maněna / Lead Gameplay Progammer

Dev Update/Viktor

Today I would like to share with you an update from the animations department. In past weeks, we have been focused mainly on player character and weapons. The latest additions to the player are improved turns when standing still. For animations, this means improving and redoing turn animations for all items. We are iterating this now in cooperation with our animation programmer to find the best result that looks and feels good.

Weapons have received some love as well. We have finished all unjamming animations, and we are focusing on implementation. First guns are now animated in the game. We are adding the missing animations like recoil and dry fire for each weapon. At the same time the logic for these firearms is being made so each weapon knows what the character can do with it. Basically, we need to cover all the states the weapon can have and provide animations for it.

We have started implementing hit reactions for the player character. There will be light and heavy animation for each direction, each item and each stance. That is some decent amount of animation data, but we already have a working prototype in the game.

Last but not least, there was small mocap session last week. We have captured some new gestures. Some of them are already implemented and some will be in the upcoming weeks. The gestures menu will now include new signals like Come, Watch, Down, Move, some new taunts and others that were requested by the community.

- Viktor Kostik / Lead Animator

Dev Update/Adam

As I have mentioned on the live-stream last week, we plan to include additional tweaks to the color of clutter (grass and other miscellaneous objects in forests) for the version 0.62 in the nearest stable update window. I'm glad to announce our environment designer Mark has prepared the first iteration of these changes and it is available on the experimental branch for you to check out. For the full list of changes made please visit the appropriate experimental thread on the official forums HERE[forums.dayz.com].

- Adam Franců / Senior map designer

Community Spotlight

Hello Survivors,

So many things happened last week and we are glad everything turned out as planned, because we really made a lot of work on it.First, we organized an event for content creators and their friends on the new castle the West. It was a PVP event in which one side defended the castle and the other attacked it with the equipment they brought with them. 51 people joined the server, unfortunately not everyone managed to get to the castle, because some of them were killed by wolves or by infected, which are simply the risks of the game. We had 14 members of the dev team there, including the lead designer Peter Nespesny and Sumrak, who is taking care of the Chernarus map and created the castle in which the event took place. The battle was really bloody and the defenders used all their strength to keep the attackers in front of the gates, but eventually succumbed and the attackers took the castle for themselves. I would like to congratulate the winners who earned their victory. How the event looked through the eyes of the attackers can be seen in a video by Jakon72:

Thanks so much to all who attended and we are looking forward to seeing you again on another event.

We were running live stream in our office at the same time as the event. We announced the switch of 0.62 update from the Experimental branch to the Stable branch. Lead producer Eugen Harton, lead designer Peter Nespesny, senior map designer Adam Francu and brand manager Martin Čulák jointly discussed what you can expect from the update 0.62 and other interesting topics. In case you missed it, you can find the video on our YouTube channel.

I would also like to address my colleagues' request from the Feedback Tracker[feedback.bistudio.com]. We need to get as much information as possible about the crashes that happen to you on the Stable and Experimental branches. Therefore, I am asking you to contact our Feedback Tracker in case of crash and upload files from the C:\Users\YourPCName\AppData\Local\DayZ folder to help to solve the crash problems.

We would like to thank for the reports about leather not getting tanned in barrels. Over the weekend you came up with an incredible number of tickets for this issue and we are just looking into it now. And of course, if you encounter any other bugs, we will be happy if you report it to our Feedback Tracker[feedback.bistudio.com].

Channel Pitstop Head made a two-part talk about DayZ with our creative director Brian Hicks, which is really interesting and can give you answers to some of the questions bothering you.

And the last piece of community content I'd like to share with you is an amazing artwork by Dominik Figlhuber, who has been able to turn an ordinary DayZ screenshot into amazing art. Simply beautiful, thank you for sharing it with us!

Original screenshot.

Waiting at daytime. Alternative edit.

Final edit.

And one last thing, I would like to show you a photo I secretly photographed in the office when the designers were discussing weapons for the update 0.63. It's not of a good quality, but I thought you might be interested. And shhh, don't tell them, they do not like taking pictures.